Greater New Orleans

Battling Fortuna at the Track

I am not as excited in the particulars of this Jazz Fest as I have been in the past. If you visit Toulouse Street often enough you would notice I have rather eclectic taste in music. Jazz, however, is in a central place in my musical pantheon. This year there is nothing as transcendently perfect as last year's Pharoah Sanders followed by Terrence Blancard date. These are the Days of the Divas in terms of major, out-of-town jazz talent and female jazz vocalists fall somewhere mid list in my own musical universe. Then there is the prospect of having to shove threw crowds of Billy Joel and TimMcGraw fans to get where I want to go.
Still, to walk up to the Fair Grounds among the large and anxious crowds on a hot Spring day is more than just a concert. It is, as I wrote of French Quarter fest last year, "...more than just an option sandwiched between a trip to Target in the morning and one to Blockbuster for a Saturday night's entertainment. It is a defining and participatory event closer to the civic religions of pre-Christian Mediterranean societies than anything in America, peopled by larger-than-life figures who represent Who We Are. Failure to propitiate them, we remind ourselves, might upset the balance of our cosmos."
The rest at: http://toulousestreet.net